Introducing the Hopeless Homeowner Series

Recently we bought a house.  It's a suburban split-level home, about fifty-five years old (so, it's about half the age of the average resident of the street where we reside).  Though it's a nice home, things in it break often.  As they break and as we - people way too young and way too under-prepared for this massive moneypit to maintain - attempt to fix them, the "Hopeless Homeowner" series of blog posts will chronicle these attempts with levity, humor, and hopefully some halfway decent advice.

Chapter 1: The Horror of Moving

We were well aware that this was the last move we could conduct this way.  After we had settled here for a number of years and decided to move, we would have to hire professional movers to move into our second home; we'd have too much stuff by then, and we'd be older then, and our friends would be less willing to lift our boxes in exchange for pizza and beer that we haven't paid for yet.

But at present, we could do things the old-fashioned way and rent ourselves a U-Haul truck.  This was a sixteen-footer, which meant that we could move everything in a maximum of two trips.  The price was reasonable and it had an automatic transmission, so we felt we were good to go.  Now, there was no chance in hell that I was ever going to drive this thing - I'd heard horror stories from my Dad, from back in the day when U-Haul trucks were on a stick shift, and if the current set up were any more user friendly than it was back then, I was not about to find out for sure. 

My fiancee, luckily, was willing to drive this vehicular monstrosity.  She made it from the rental place to our apartment just fine, but even she will admit that the first trip from the apartment to the new home was harrowing.  I felt it was horrific - the truck was difficult to steady when loaded to the gills, and it had such a wide girth (giggity) that it was challenging to keep it within one lane of a multi-lane highway. 

At one point, we hopped the curb on Route 18 in New Brunswick and had difficulty finding pavement again.  The drive between our old apartment and our new home is kind of challenging, even by New Jersey standards, and even when driving a regular passenger car.  There are multiple left exits, a traffic circle, lots of right-hand merges, and many curves.  Also, New Jersey drivers are not particularly well known for their compassion or empathy when it comes to being around slow-moving vehicles; this is a cramped and dense place, and people like to get where they are going fast.  There is little of the thrill of the open road in the Garden State, and when it comes to not traveling the speed limit, the weak are indeed killed and eaten here. 

It almost goes without saying that the U-Haul truck we had rented and loaded with over 3,000 pounds of our personal belongings was not agile enough for most of our neighboring drivers' standards. After parking the truck at the new house, she told me that it reminded her of the drunk driving simulator glasses that schools provide to students.

Since then, I've seen many rental trucks on the highway in our daily travels.  I've seen many cars on the road do things like pass these rental trucks on the right hand side or honk at them to get them to move faster, and this is a really terrible thing to do.  The only qualification to rent one of these trucks is a valid drivers' license, and many of the people driving them have never navigated the road in something even half as unwieldy before in their lives.  So combine the average driver's level of incompetence with a ten-times-more challenging vehicle to drive, and the moral of the story is - if you see a U-Haul on the road, give it a wide berth and an even wider dose of patience.

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My best friends know that I don't handle Moving Day well.  They tell me this all the time, and that's why they're best friends.  Those 1-2 days surrounding a move are terrible, though - you feel pressured by the clock as you count down the last 48 hours before the move starts, and you also feel as if you're regressing backwards in time.  Items that were once creature comforts in your old home (like soap, or toilet paper) become challenging items to find.  For a brief while, you're a traveler without a home, you're a vagabond and you'd gladly give your soul (assuming these exist) to be settled down someplace.

After you move, it's the reverse, upward climb to the modern days.  The first night in your new home, before the boxes and the clothing are unpacked, before all but the barest essentials are set up, you're happy to have a toothbrush, an operable toilet bowl, and a mattress on the floor upon which to fall unconscious.  By the second night, you've left the Dark Ages (at least) and through a day of pure hard work, you've set up the basics - utensils, the refrigerator, the next few days' worth of clothing, and you're now sleeping on an actual bed.  By the third or fourth night, you've ordered a few appliances and if you're lucky, Cable Claus might stop by with a stocking filled with TV and high-speed Internet.  You've possibly gone on a grocery shopping trip and you're no longer eating leftover pizza and sub sandwiches from Moving Day.

As we've ascended from the prehistoric times of Night 1 to the practically modern times that we live in now, I've become easier to get along with.  I've learned recently that some people call migraine headaches "vacation headaches" because they sometimes occur as a function of too much anticipation leading up to the vacation itself - once vacations starts, all of that anticipation is released at once, and the end result is the headache.  I don't get these headaches, but I do get really stressed out right after something major and life-changing happens, and that's what happened with the move.  Also, that's what happened with the sunglasses - I'll tell that story later.

We're 16 days in - I'm etching tiny marks in the cinderblock walls of the basement like Andy Dufresne, counting the days until my release to a 55+ active adult community - and by now we've unpacked most of our boxes.  The living room floor, which was once a chaotic staging area for sixteen different home improvement projects, has nothing but a few boxes of DVD's and all of my tools.  (Hey, this is the last time in my adult life that I'll be able to keep my tools so centrally located in the house, so you bet your ass that I am milking this for all it is worth.)

Most days, with considerable help and patience from others, I am able to complete at least one homeowner task.  Generally these have been simple chores, owing mostly to the fact that we bought a nice house that was practically "move-in ready" (to borrow the realtor parlance).  I've been able to mow the lawn twice, we've pulled weeds and bought new plants that we're trying valiantly not to kill.  I've installed a towel rack (more complicated than you'd think when drilling into tile), replaced a thermosensor in our oven, started pipe leaks, blown fuses, thrown my sunglasses against a cinderblock wall (consequently breaking them) and generally have started to come to terms with the fact that (a) I currently don't know what I'm doing around here, for the most part; (b) most new homeowners are in the same boat that I am in; and (c) that I'll soon learn how resourceful I am.

Assuming that anyone out there is interested, as I make my way down the path of home ownership I'll periodically post here with updates (and pictures, where relevant) on our progress with the home.  I'll generally save this for projects that have either an interesting genesis or an interesting execution, since I'm no Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor and as a result, no one wants to hear boring home improvement stories from me.

That being said, I'll be sure to post if/when I injure myself or engage in a particularly colorful application of the word "Fuck" while completing said projects.